Sky of Blue and Sea of Green

I'm ruining my child and I don't care.

With my having joined Sarah at the same university, all three of us now travel together to work each day, which means that I've tried to exert a little more control over the radio. And since CBS for some reason decided to kill Boston's oldies station, we've been listening to CDs more frequently, in particular the Beatles' "One."

The end result of this series of occurrences is that Nicholas is pretty close to memorizing all of the lyrics to "Yellow Submarine."

There's actually more of a back story, of course. A few years ago, someone (I think maybe Uncle Mike & Aunt Melinda?) got Nicholas a bath toy, a little motorized submarine that was both yellow and skippered by Elmo. So in the bath, he would play with it, and I would jokingly sing "We all live in an Elmo submarine..."

So when he heard the song on the CD, it clicked in his head and he just wants to listen over and over again. He wanders around the house singing the refrain and varied lyrics (usually several half-lines from different parts of the song mashed together). And of course we can listen to that CD all the time now because it's a Nicholas favorite.

Oh, and just so you know, the psychedelic later music in general appeals better to the kiddie set. He barely notices the "boy band" early music ("Love Me Do," "Eight Days a Week" and the like). But the later music, which tell stories of strange occurrences, is more attractive. In that vein, his other favorite song from the CD is "Hello, Goodbye," largely because of its silly coda, with the repeated chant of "Hey-la, hey-la hey lo-la" and then a vocal percussion sound that I can't quite render in writing but is hilarious and then annoying coming from a three-year-old.

In any case, I'm happy that he likes the Beatles, Grandma Alice is happy, and I've effectively ruined him for modern "music."